Posts Tagged ‘Mountain Dew’

To celebrate the release of their API, Spotify sponsored a Hack-a-thon at SPiN Ping Pong Club in New York City from Friday February 24 until Sunday February 26. Spotify was joined by big brands like Doritos, CW, McDonald’s, Showtime, State Farm and Mountain Dew. Technology companies sponsoring the event included Facebook, Twilio, FourSquare, The Echo Nest and of course, GoGrid. GoGrid provided all the cloud servers for the event to support the developers as they created brand new apps using the Spotify API in conjunction with other API like Facebook’s Open Graph. GoGrid’s manager of cloud ecosystem, Paul Lancaster and I were on-hand to meet with developers and provide support for the event.

50 CentOS x64 cloud servers were provisioned to the hackers by GoGrid to build their applications free of charge with root level access for maximum flexibility. Hundreds of hackers showed up to build the next great apps and were treated to live performances by Blood Orange and MNDR. While hack-a-thons tend to have attrition over time, hackers stayed throughout the night and most for the entire weekend.

There were roughly 30 projects worked on during the weekend which ranged from an app called Museik (UI shown above) that extracts content from the internet related to the release date of a song on Spotify to a project called Orbidal by the students of the VCU Brandcenter that gathers the collective feelings of your Facebook feed and creates a playlist based on that mood on Spotify.